Last week when I posted a news item on Facebook about the controversial film “The Interview” being reinstated into 331 theaters and VOD on Christmas Day, my friends were split into two camps.

About half wondered if the Sony hack had all been a part of some long-term marketing campaign/conspiracy. The other half assumed it was a dumb, lowbrow Seth Rogen movie and couldn’t believe North Korea was getting so worked up about it in the first place.

They were all wrong. Or half wrong, at least. Let me explain.

On point one: No, the “Guardians of Peace” hack of Sony Pictures emails and threat of terrorist action against theaters showing the movie was not a marketing ploy. It devastated the company on so many levels, revealing confidential emails and company figures that were not only embarrassing but also legitimately damaging to business partnerships.

“The Interview” cost about $100 million to produce and market. As of last week, it’s made just over 3.5 million in theaters and more than $15 million on VOD. For online and streaming video, those are record-breaking numbers, but this story set off an unprecedented mass media firestorm that won’t happen again. Was it free publicity? Sure. But given the $60 million to $110 million Sony was expecting to haul in at theaters alone — before even going to home video and VOD — it’s a huge financial loss.

On the second point: “The Interview” is indeed a lowbrow comedy, and it certainly has more than its share of potty humor, but it’s not just some dumb movie — and the fictitious assassination of a living world leader is not even the most dangerous thing about it.

Mass-appeal Hollywood product has enormous cultural influence, and the satirical premise on which the film is based will have long-term effects on the way people worldwide view the North Korean dictatorship of Kim Jong-un. With over 2 million illegal views, it’s already been pirated like crazy.

Writer Dan Sterling, along with co-directors Rogen and Evan Goldberg, are riffing off one absurd idea: the facade of the Pyongyang dictatorship. Rich Klein from The New York Times called the movie “Chernobyl for the digital age,” further adding that it erodes “the myths, fabrications and bluster that keep the Kim dynasty in power.”

As played in the movie by Randall Park, Kim is an insecure, misunderstood young man with bigger daddy issues than Hamlet. The population is starving, while window displays dress up empty grocery stores as plentiful. Young girls are plucked from schools to serve at the pleasure of the regime. The population is brainwashed to think the ruling family are gods.

And as the opening scene of the movie shows, children are taught to wish death upon America. As a missile is launched from a crowded public city square, one cute little girl sings: “Die, America die/Oh please won’t you die?/It would fill my tiny heart with joy.”

From a film criticism standpoint, I found “The Interview” to be uneven but riotously funny. Of course it’s immature at times. The parody of entertainment news is an easy target, but it’s taken to such extremes (with Rob Lowe and Eminem for starters) that it’s impossible not to admire it on that point alone.

The bromance is still what Rogen and Goldberg do best — here it’s a three-way bromance — and it’s surprising how well it still works, especially given all the surrounding mayhem.

http://www.lawrence.com/users/photos/2015/jan/02/284431/

Lastly, there’s James Franco. Wow. Just wow. Like “Pineapple Express,” Rogen is the straight man and Franco the wacky one, but in “The Interview,” Franco’s mugging has reached new levels of insanity.

As self-obsessed TV host Dave Skylark, Franco starts at 11 and notches it up from there. It’s hard not to feel like part of this hammy performance is a put-on just to see how much craziness an audience can take before a complete break with the “reality” of the film happens, but sometimes Franco’s delivery and timing are really inventive — and, yes, downright hilarious.

Through it all, Rogen and Goldberg maintain an air of self-deprecating charm that so often lets them off the hook (“This is the End,” “Superbad”) when not every joke lands.

Yes, “The Interview” is mostly full of lowbrow humor, but that’s also what’s so dangerous about it. While everybody is laughing at Rogen putting a missile up his butt, the premise about North Korea that we’re taking for granted (parodied from actual research about the secretive country) is burrowing its way into our collective subconscious. And it’s not going away anytime soon.